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Where is Seven Seas? [Updated]

Update: According to Tiamat, Seven Seas had a significant server crash, which appears to have included nearly a month of lost data from their forum. In any case, the website is back online now. See. No reason to panic.

Update Edit: They apparently don’t quite have everything squared away yet. http://www.gomanga.com goes to their page but just http://gomanga.com still gives me an error. Well, at least their page is mostly back.

I was first alerted that Seven Sea’s website, gomanga.com, was returning an error (specifically “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at http://www.gomanga.com&#8221;) from gia yesterday. I had forgotten about it today until I saw Tiamat’s post on the same topic, and sure enough, it’s still down.

Thanks to this cool online tool (I should try that for my IP), I see that 10 websites are listed for the same IP address as gomanga.com’s (added note: after doing nslookup on some of these domains individually, I’m not sure about the correctness of the above tool, but nslookup is acting flaky when looking these up anyway. I’m pretty sure one of these is wrong, which I’ll address in a minute):

7seasbooksforkids.com

kefmix.com

sevenseasentertainment.com

amerimanga.com (P.S. Seven Seas. this domain expires in a week)

aoihouse.net

forum.gomanga.com (just a subdomain, so not independently registered)

gomanga.com

oelmanga.com (appears to not be configured, or it just gets forwarded)

sevenseasmanga.com, and

worldmanga.com

Out of these 10 addresses, 7 of them are registered by a Jason DeAngelis at Seven Seas, aoihouse.net is registered by Adam Arnold, also with Seven Seas, while oelmanga.com isn’t registered under anyone in particular, but it’s logical to assume it’s also part of Seven Seas.

I’m not sure what kefmix.com is. It doesn’t look registered by Seven Seas, but it has apparently been there since at least January 2006 with a page saying that the domain isn’t configured.

That effectively means that out of 10 sites, 9 are with Seven Seas and the 10th has been misconfigured for over 2 years. From this I think we can pretty safely assume that they have their own dedicated server.

This is where the above listing of sites on the single domain starts to get weird, as the whois for sevenseasmanga.com clearly shows a different nameserver than gomanga.com. When was the whois info updated? April 2, 2008 – the last day gomanga.com was known to be online according to google cache.

sevenseasmanga.com also doesn’t appear to have been online AT ALL before this either (even though it appears to have been registered in 2004). Searching for the domain in google comes up with nothing, and there is nothing at archive.org.

Is is starting to lead down one possible explanation for what’s going on: Seven seas is switching from gomanga.com to sevenseasmanga.com (and possibly or even probably switching servers in the process) BUT…something has gone out of wack in the process and now all the sites on the old server are down.

Indeed, when I do a whois lookup for gomanga.com at the actual host’s website, they have a listing for “nameserver” and “server response code” and both return “null,” suggesting that, if correct, the name isn’t associated with any server anymore. Indeed, when I went back and did a whois search at the actual host’s site for a couple of the other sites, they all returned the same thing: null responses.

As a result, once again, this looks like a situation where basically the old domain names have been disassociated with the old server (I know the server itself isn’t down because I can ping it).

All this is, of course, weird since the site is just offline, which shouldn’t happen even if they are moving domains and/or servers, which is why it’s starting to increasingly look like to me like a botched domain & server move on Seven Sea’s and/or host’s part.

Of course there are other possibilities like forgetting to pay or, god forbid, Seven Seas going under, but I just don’t see evidence for that. First off, the “status” of gomanga.com says “OK” when, at least in theory, a code should show up saying whether they have been locked due to non-payment. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t think that Seven Seas would still be getting their titles out on time like they have if they’re about to go under.

Thus I go back and believe the best explanation is the botched switchover. I guess we’ll see in time.

2 thoughts on “Where is Seven Seas? [Updated]”

I just ran my website’s IP through that online tool. It came up with 595 sites that share the same server with me T_T. (though, oddly, my website isn’t even one of the ones listed lol. So who knows how reliable that tool is after all).